Monthly Archives: November 2015

Spawning Tool has been around for years. It has seen its ups and downs, but never have we seen the activity we saw right after the LotV launch. Our plan to prepare for the launch was to get the build orders feature launched and try to market it as much as possible. The expectations was that the site views would go up by a pretty decent amount, because people need build orders!

These days it can be hard to find build orders. Many of the sites that posted quality builds, stopped mid HotS. This left a niche open for us to jump into! Apparently we did something right!

After the LotV launch, we saw a HUGE jump in views.

When we got this info, we were happy that the preparation paid off. We were glad to see that despite all the talk of the decline of StarCraft and no one laddering, there was clearly a huge interest in build orders and replays.

Here are some more stats that we have gathered!

This is a very promising sign to see. The fact that more than half of our views are from people that have already used the site before leads us to think that we are doing our jobs well. People would not come back to a site if they did not see any improvement value in it.

One thing we have been really hyped about is the amount of people on the site throughout the day. As I am writing this post, it is 6am EST. The site has been averaging from 20-40 active viewers every time that I have checked since the launch.

Build wise, there are many people posting, viewing, and getting involved. There can never be enough StarCraft content though! If any of you have a cool build or idea, you’re welcome to add your builds. Or if you just want to learn a new build, just come by to study up (and vote and comment while you’re at it). We are very open to getting new people to help out if they are interested.

Overall, thanks to all the content creators and build posters that have gotten involved already. You guys made this entire plan possible! We want to continue this and are excited for the future of Spawning Tool and StarCraft :).

I usually try to post interesting things from Spawning Tool data, but here’s a very boring result from some analysis I did. Using the ~15,000 professional HotS replays in Spawning Tool, I bucketed them by month and then calculated the average game length. I was thinking that maybe game lengths would have increased as players got better and didn’t lose as much early. As you can see that didn’t happen as game lengths remained roughly the same (about 16 minutes)

I didn’t dig too much further because I didn’t really see any trends. You can see the data I used to generate the graph at

You might be wondering: what type of all-in starts with economic cheese? The type that wants to have a sustained attack as soon as possible, that’s what.

In this game, Snute cuts corners and goes for almost pure Drones for the first 4 minutes of the game. This allows him to get up to 6 Extractors and spread Drones across 3 mineral lines before he lines up his attack. From there, he streams Roaches and Ravagers across the map to bust down walls and forcefields to force his way into the Protoss base.

On the flipside, State played it safe opening Gateway first, then getting his Nexus afterwards. WIth a quick +1 attack, he also gets his 3rd base quickly after scouting Snute’s greedy build, and then into Blink.

When the Ravagers attack, State already has his simcity in place with Gateways clogging up the entry into his 3rd base, so despite being down at times 70 to 15 army supply, Snute has difficulty finding space to push in. State continues to build pylons to power his Gateways and for the Overcharge.

With Blink up, though, State makes a great hold: his 3 base economy (with more Probes than Snute has Drones) allows him to slowly get back into the game while Snute’s slow Roaches walk across the map. The battle continues on for minutes, but State keeps his 3rd base alive and evens the supply count. When the pressure begins to lighten, State is able to push for a 4th base as his minerals begin to run out his in main. When the supplys even up, he traps Snute’s army and pushes across for the win.